At four in the morning, the shift changed and a new nurse arrived and found Irina blocking the entrance. She was a large black woman who smelled of fresh bread.
“Please, leave them on their own a little longer,” the young woman begged her, and went on to pour out the story of the lover who had come to keep Alma company on this final journey. They could not be interrupted.
“At this time of day there are no visitors,” the bewildered nurse told Irina, pushing her aside and opening the door.
Ichimei had gone, and the air in the room was filled with his absence.
* * *
They kept a private vigil over Alma’s body for a few hours in the Sea Cliff mansion, where she had spent almost all her life. Her simple pine box was placed in the dining room lit by eighteen tall candles in the same solid silver menorahs the family had always used for traditional celebrations. Although they were not observant, the Belascos arranged the funeral rites in accordance with the rabbi’s instructions. Alma had frequently repeated that she wished to go from bed to cemetery, with no synagogue rite of passage between. Two pious women from the Chevra Kadisha washed the body and wrapped it in a white linen shroud without pockets, to signify equality in death and the abandonment of all worldly goods.
Like an invisible shadow, Irina joined in the mourning, remaining behind Seth. He seemed beside himself with grief, unable to believe his immortal grandmother had suddenly abandoned him. A family member had remained with Alma until the moment they took her to the cemetery, to give her spirit time to detach and bid good-bye. Flowers were considered frivolous and so there were none, but Irina carried a gardenia to the cemetery, where the rabbi recited a brief prayer: Baruch dayan ha’emet, “Blessed is the true judge.” The coffin was lowered into the ground, alongside that of Nathaniel, and when the family members came to throw handfuls of earth to cover it, Irina let her gardenia drop onto her friend. That night saw the start of seven days of mourning in seclusion and shiva prayers. In an unexpected gesture, Larry and Doris asked Irina to stay with them, to console Seth. Like the rest of the family, Irina put a piece of torn fabric on her chest, as a symbol of mourning.
On the seventh day, after receiving the line of visitors who came to offer their condolences each afternoon, the Belascos resumed their everyday routines, returning to their own lives. A month after the funeral, they would light a candle in Alma’s name, and at the end of a year there would be a simple ceremony when her name was engraved on the headstone. By that time, most of those who had known her would think of her only occasionally. Alma would live on in her silk screens, in her grandson Seth’s obsessive memory, and in the hearts of Irina Bazili as well as Kirsten, who would never comprehend where she had gone. During shiva, Irina and Seth impatiently waited for Ichimei Fukuda to put in an appearance, but the seven days went by without a sign of him.
The first thing Irina did after the week of ritual mourning was to go to Lark House to collect Alma’s belongings. She had obtained Hans Voigt’s permission to take a few days off but soon had to return to work. The apartment was exactly as Alma had left it, since Lupita had decided not to clean until the family relinquished it. The scant pieces of furniture, bought to be of use rather than decorative in such a reduced space, were to be donated to the Shop of Forgotten Objects, except for the apricot-colored armchair where the cat had spent his last years. Irina decided to give this to Cathy, who had always liked it. As she put the clothes into suitcases—the pairs of baggy trousers, linen tunics, long vicuña wool jackets, silk scarves—she wondered who would inherit all this, wishing she herself was as tall and strong as Alma to be able to wear her clothes, to wear bright-red lipstick like her and use her masculine bergamot-and-orange-scented cologne. She put everything else into boxes, which the Belasco chauffeur would pick up later. In them were the albums that traced Alma’s life, some documents, a few books, the gloomy oil painting of Topaz, and little else.
Irina realized that Alma had prepared her departure as thoroughly as she did everything: she had divested herself of all the superfluous and kept only the indispensable; she had sorted out both her belongings and her memories. During the week of shiva Irina had found time to mourn, but as she swept away Alma’s presence at Lark House, she said good-bye again; it was like burying her a second time. Overcome with grief, she sat down amidst the boxes and cases and opened the bag Alma always took with her on her escapades, which the police had recovered from the ruins of the Smart car and which Irina had brought back from the hospital. Inside she found Alma’s silk nightshirts, her lotions and creams, a couple of changes of clothes, and the portrait of Ichimei in its silver frame. The glass was splintered. She removed the pieces carefully and took out the photograph, to bid farewell to the mysterious lover. It was then that a letter that Alma must have kept behind the photograph fell into her lap.
At that moment somebody pushed the door half-open and timidly stuck their head in. It was Kirsten. Irina got to her feet, and Kirsten hugged her with her customary enthusiasm.
“Where is Alma?” she asked.
“In heaven,” was the only answer that occurred to Irina.
“When will she return?”
“She won’t be coming back, Kirsten.”
“Never ever?”
“No.”
A shadow of sorrow or concern flitted across Kirsten’s innocent face. She took off her glasses, wiped them on the edge of her T-shirt, and put them back on before poking her face closer to Irina, to see her more clearly.
“Do you promise me she won’t return?”
“I promise you. But you have a lot of friends here, Kirsten, and we all love you very much.”
Kirsten signaled for her to wait and set off down the glassed-in corridor, her flat feet clumping, toward the chocolate magnate’s mansion, where the pain clinic was housed. Fifteen minutes later she returned with her knapsack on her back, panting from her haste, which her big heart had difficulty coping with. She closed and then locked the apartment door, drew the curtains stealthily, and put her fingers to her lips to warn Irina to keep quiet. Finally she handed her the knapsack and waited, hands behind her back and a knowing smile on her face as she rocked back and forth on her heels. “It’s for you,” she said.
Undoing the backpack, Irina saw several packets tied with rubber bands and knew instantly they were the letters Alma had received so regularly and that she and Seth had sought for so long, the ones from Ichimei. They had not been lost forever in a bank vault as the two of them had feared, but had been stored in the safest place in the world, in Kirsten’s backpack. Irina understood now that Alma, realizing death was drawing near, had given Kirsten the responsibility of looking after them and had told her who to give them to. But why to her? Why not to her son or grandson?
Irina took it as a posthumous message from Alma, her way of showing how much she loved and trusted her. At that moment, she could feel something in her chest shattering like a clay vessel, while her heart swelled with profound gratitude. Faced with such a proof of friendship, she realized how deeply cherished she was, as she had been during her early childhood. The monsters of her past were beginning to recede, and her stepfather’s videos, which had exerted such frightening power over her, were somehow reduced to their true dimensions. They seemed like bleak carcasses fed on by anonymous scavengers without identity or soul, now powerless.
“My God, Kirsten. Just imagine, I’ve lived half my life fearing something that isn’t real.”
“For you,” Kirsten repeated, pointing to the contents of her backpack strewn across the floor.
* * *
That afternoon, when Seth returned to his apartment, Irina threw her arms around his neck and kissed him with a newfound joy, scarcely appropriate to a time of mourning.
“I’ve got a surprise for you, Seth,” she announced.
“Me too. But tell me yours first.”
Irina steered him impatiently toward the granite kitchen island, where she had put the packets of letters from the b
ackpack.
“These are Alma’s letters. I was waiting for you to come to open them.”
The packets were numbered from one to eleven, and contained ten envelopes apiece, all except the first, which had six letters and a few drawings. They sat on the sofa and looked at them in the order their owner had left them. A hundred and six missives in total, some brief and others longer, some more informative than others, all signed simply “Ichi.” The ones in the first packet were written on sheets torn from an exercise book in a childish hand, from Tanforan and Topaz, and were so badly censored that their meaning was lost. The drawings already hinted at the polished style and firm brushstrokes that characterized the painting that Alma had taken with her to Lark House. It would take them several days to read all the correspondence, but a swift glance at the other packets showed they were dated from 1969 on. Forty years of an irregular correspondence that had one thing in common: they were all love letters.
“I also found a letter dated January 2010; it was behind Ichimei’s portrait. But all these letters are old and are addressed to the Belascos’ house at Sea Cliff. Where are those she received at Lark House over the past three years?”
“I think these are the ones, Irina.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My grandmother collected Ichimei’s letters her whole life through, all those that came to Sea Cliff, where she always lived. Then, when she moved to Lark House, she began sending the letters to herself every so often, one by one, in the yellow envelopes you and I saw. She received and read them, treasuring them as if they were new.”
“Why would she do such a thing, Seth? Alma was in her right mind. She never showed any sign of senility.”
“That’s what is so extraordinary, Irina. She was well aware of what she was doing; she wanted to keep the great love of her life alive. That old woman, who seemed so armor plated, was at heart an incurable romantic. I’m sure she also sent herself the weekly gardenias, and that her escapades were not spent with her lover; she went alone to the cabin at Point Reyes to relive her past encounters there, to dream about what she could no longer share with Ichimei.”
“But why not? She was on her way back from being with him when the accident occurred. Ichimei went to the hospital to say good-bye to her; I saw him kiss her, I know they loved each other, Seth.”
“You couldn’t have seen him, Irina. I was surprised he showed no reaction to my grandmother’s death, given that the news came out in the press. If he loved her as much as we believe, he would have attended the funeral or have offered his condolences at shiva. Today I decided to look him up; I wanted to meet him and lay to rest the doubts I had about my grandmother. It was very easy: all I had to do was turn up at the Fukudas’ nursery.”
“It still exists?”
“Yes. It’s run by Peter Fukuda, one of Ichimei’s sons. When I told him my name, he received me very warmly, because he knew all about the Belasco family, and he went to call Delphine, his mother. She is very friendly and pretty; she has one of those Asian faces that seem never to age.”
“She’s Ichimei’s wife. Alma said she met her at your great-grandfather’s funeral.”
“She’s not Ichimei’s wife, Irina. She’s his widow. Ichimei died of a heart attack three years ago.”
“That’s impossible!” she exclaimed.
“He died around the same time my grandmother went to live at Lark House. Possibly the two things are connected in some way. I think that letter dated 2010, the last one Alma received, was his good-bye.”
“But I saw Ichimei at the hospital!”
“You saw what you wanted to see, Irina.”
“No, Seth. I’m sure it was him. That is what happened: Alma loved Ichimei so much that she succeeded in having him come to find her.”
January 8, 2010
How exuberant and boisterous the universe is, Alma! It turns and turns, and the only constant is everything changes. It is a mystery we can only appreciate out of stillness. I’m living through a very interesting stage. My spirit contemplates the changes in my body with fascination, but this contemplation is not from a distance, but from within. My spirit and my body are together in this process. Yesterday you told me how you missed our youthful illusion of immortality. Not me. I take pleasure in my reality of being a mature man, or should I say an old one. If I were going to die in the next three days, what would I do during that time? Nothing! I would empty myself of everything but love.
We have often said that loving each other is our destiny, that we have loved each other in past lives and will go on meeting in lives to come. Or it may be there is no past or future, and everything takes place simultaneously in the universe’s infinite dimensions. If that is so, we remain together forever.
It’s fantastic to be alive. We are still seventeen years old, my Alma.
Ichi
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Isabel Allende
English translation copyright © by Isabel Allende
Originally published as El Amante Japonés in 2015 in Spain by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.
English language translation by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
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Jacket photographs: Woman © Mary Evans / Classic Stock / H. Armstrong Roberts; Golden Gate from Baker Beach © Greg Probst / Corbis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allende, Isabel.
[El amante Japonés. English]
The Japanese lover : a novel / Isabel Allende ; translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. — First edition.
pages cm
“Originally published as El Amante Japonés in 2015 in Spain by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial” — Verso title page.
1. Older women—Fiction. 2. Love in old age—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 4. Japanese Americans—Fiction. 5. Family secrets—Fiction. 6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Caistor, Nick, translator. II. Hopkinson, Amanda, date, translator. III. Title.